Geography

Located in southeast Europe, the country consists largely of fertile
black soil steppes. Mountainous areas include the Carpathians in the
southwest and the Crimean chain in the south. Ukraine is bordered by
Belarus on the north, by Russia on the north and east, by the Black Sea on
the south, by Moldova and Romania on the southwest, and by Hungary,
Slovakia, and Poland on the west.

Government

Constitutional republic.

History

Ukraine was known as “Kievan Rus” (from which
Russia
is a derivative) up until the 16th century. In the 9th century, Kiev was
the major political and cultural center in eastern Europe. Kievan Rus
reached the height of its power in the 10th century and adopted Byzantine
Christianity. The Mongol conquest in 1240 ended Kievan power. From the
13th to the 16th century, Kiev was under the influence of Poland and
western Europe. The negotiation of the Union of Brest-Litovsk in 1596
divided the Ukrainians into Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic faithful. In
1654, Ukraine asked the czar of Moscovy for protection against Poland, and
the Treaty of Pereyasav signed that year recognized the suzerainty of
Moscow. The agreement was interpreted by Moscow as an invitation to take
over Kiev, and the Ukrainian state was eventually absorbed into the
Russian Empire.

After the Russian Revolution, Ukraine declared its independence from
Russia on Jan. 28, 1918, and several years of warfare ensued with several
groups. The Red Army finally was victorious over Kiev, and in 1920 Ukraine
became a Soviet republic. In 1922, Ukraine became one of the founders of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the 1930s, the Soviet
government's enforcement of collectivization met with peasant resistance,
which in turn prompted the confiscation of grain from Ukrainian farmers by
Soviet authorities; the resulting famine took an estimated 5 million
lives. Ukraine was one of the most devastated Soviet republics after World
War II. (For details on World War II,
see
Headline History, World
War II.) On April 26, 1986, the nation's nuclear power plant at Chernobyl
was the site of the world's worst nuclear accident. On Oct. 29, 1991, the
Ukrainian parliament voted to shut down the reactor within two years' time
and asked for international assistance in dismantling it.